Abstract
There are many Requirements Engineering approaches and techniques that help to specify, analyze and validate requirements in the context of practically any kind of project. However, they are neither widely accepted nor widely used by industrial software community. One of the main problems faced when applying a requirement technique is to what extent it can be easily adapted to the specific needs of the project. This has often led to unsatisfactory requirements management in industrial software development. Currently, Use Case model is the most widely accepted despite its restricted expressiveness and overloaded semantics. Other more sophisticated modeling techniques have been developed independently of any others and/or for specific application domains. Frequently, techniques that provide richer expressiveness do not include scalability from other more popular techniques nor do they offer integration with other more advanced techniques. In this work, we present an approach for requirements modeling that allows the integration of the expressiveness of some of the more relevant techniques in the Requirements Engineering arena. Our work takes advantage of metamodeling as a medium for integrating and customizing Requirements Engineering techniques. By focusing on the scalability with respect to expressiveness and adaptability to the application domain, we have established some basic guidelines and extension mechanisms that lend coherence and semantic precision to our approach. A case study is presented to describe the application of our approach in a real-life project and the tool support we are using.

BibTeX

@misc{issi_web:id:213,
title = "A Metamodeling Approach for Requirements Specification",
author = "Elena Navarro Martínez and Patricio Letelier Torres and Jose Antonio Mocholí Agües and Isidro Ramos Salavert",
booktitle = "Journal of Computer Information Systems, XLVI(5), pp. 67-77, Special Issue on Systems Analysis and Design, ed. Keng Siau",
year = "2006",
eprint = "http://issi.dsic.upv.es/publications/archives/",
url = "",
abstract = "There are many Requirements Engineering approaches and techniques that help to specify, analyze and validate requirements in the context of practically any kind of project. However, they are neither widely accepted nor widely used by industrial software community. One of the main problems faced when applying a requirement technique is to what extent it can be easily adapted to the specific needs of the project. This has often led to unsatisfactory requirements management in industrial software development. Currently, Use Case model is the most widely accepted despite its restricted expressiveness and overloaded semantics. Other more sophisticated modeling techniques have been developed independently of any others and/or for specific application domains. Frequently, techniques that provide richer expressiveness do not include scalability from other more popular techniques nor do they offer integration with other more advanced techniques. In this work, we present an approach for requirements modeling that allows the integration of the expressiveness of some of the more relevant techniques in the Requirements Engineering arena. Our work takes advantage of metamodeling as a medium for integrating and customizing Requirements Engineering techniques. By focusing on the scalability with respect to expressiveness and adaptability to the application domain, we have established some basic guidelines and extension mechanisms that lend coherence and semantic precision to our approach. A case study is presented to describe the application of our approach in a real-life project and the tool support we are using."
}